I just noticed this tweet from Foursquare in my Twitter timeline, which states that they are now achieving 10 or more checkins per second! They don’t say whether that’s averaged out over every timezone, or if it’s just in US timezones “right now”. It is Thursday afternoon/night in the US now, so it would make sense that it’s right now, when people are moving around and going out for the evening. 10 checkins per second is 600 per minute, 36,000 per hour and a substantial 864,000 per day.
That’s starting to be a lot of checkins! I wonder how many Gowalla is getting right now? Also, I wonder how many checkins Facebook will get when it launches its location feature? With over 400 million existing users, I’d say they would easily be able to achieve a million checkins a day with not too much effort at all. No doubt Facebook has been too busy dealing with the much talked about privacy issues to consider launching another potential privacy minefield this week.
Are you using Foursquare yet? Yesterday on Twitter I mentioned that I’ve become a little bored with it, after using it for months. I’d really like to see them implement image uploads and replies, like Gowalla has. Being able to pin images to locations is kind of like a user generated streetview, or venueview, and makes things a lot more interesting I think. Having said that, I’m still using Foursquare daily.
Do you think you’ll use the new Facebook location feature when it launches? If so, can you see yourself using more than one location service at the same time?
